Denham, Town of Make – Believe

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 153, 24 March 1939, Page 14

Denham, Town of Make - Believe

Brilliant Buildings in a Rustic Hamlet

/YUTSIDE the great British film studios at Denham, in Bueldnghamshire, a score or so of miles from London, there is a long strip of grass. On this strip of grass sightseers congregate every day. They stop their motor-cars; they prop up their motor-cycles; they even get oil or out of their vehicles, produce their luncheons, and lie on the greensward, gazing raptly at every machine that swings through the gates into the 67 acres of buildings within which are made many of England s best and most ambitious pictures.

THERE is little enough for them to see, except the long and comparatively low, white, and unornamented edifices of the studios, grouped in rectangular fashion around central courtyards. These buildings flash and gleam in the sunshine with a Mediterranean brilliance. So far as the spectators in the roadway can see, little

or nothing ever disturbs the calm that broods over them, though inside all is activity. The stars come to work from London too early in the morning to be caught motoring to this home of arc lamps and stages. Occasionally the uniformed attendant who guards the gates rushes out from his hut, and stops an entering car. The bunches of watching people manifest a sudden stir of interest, thinking that at last someone famous has arrived. They are wrong. It is only the unknown who are stopped at the gates. They have to show their .credentials, for the right of entry is a closely protected privilege. Every visitor to Denham knows the films that have made its name celebrated throughout the world. “Fire Over England,” that paean of Elizabethan patriotism, came from here; and so did “Knight Without Armour,” from the novel by James Hilton, the first film that Marlene Dietrich acted in in England. Here Charles Laughton worked on “Rembrandt,” and

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer chose it for producing their initial venture into the English cinema industry, bringing Robert Taylor over from America to star in “A Yank at Oxford.” A. E. W. Mason, Mary Borden and Rudyard Kipling have provided stories that have been made into films at Denham.

Yet it is not only in the last three years, since the studios have been open, that works of art—if the word may be used —have come out of this small Buckinghamshire village. At the other end of the hamlet from the studios is the massively towered church; and from the church there leads an avenue of Jime trees to Denham Court, a country house of which John Dryden said, “Nature had conspired with art to make the garden one of the most delicious spots in England,” He added that while at Denham he was writing a song in celebration of the “patroness of musick,” St. Cecilia.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes one about Denham is its moderation and absolute lack of pretentiousness. The country round the village preserves the same traits. Nowhere does it rise to a height of more than 200 feet. The parish itself covers an area of only 3939 acres, which is, for example, only one-fifth the size of the

parish of Hartland in Devon. The same moderation of temper seems to be characteristic of its people. Such are the surroundings of _ Britain’s most famous film studio, a studio that contains, it is claimed, the two largest stages in Europe. There is no pretence at all about the village of Denham. But pretence

is the very foundation upon which the products of Denham studios are built. On passing through the gates of the headquarters of London Films the visitor steps into a new world. The stones of the village houses are warm, red, mellowed English brick, but the box-shaped buildings of the cinema company have rather a Spanish air. Rising thus out of a typically English countryside they seem for the moment almost unreal. There is the same air of unreality about the restaurant where, in the middle of the day, elegant ladies in long, trailing evening dresses, and bronzed warriors in Scottish kilts can be seen unexpectedly making hay of sausages and mash. If this is odd, there is something even more surprising about the scale of charges. But to the visitor accustomed to the expenses of a London restaurant, the surprise is an entirely pleasant one, for a big dish of fish and chips and a glass of lemonade costs no more than ninepence. In the workshops, too, an ingenious unreality reigns. Plaster litters the

floors, and skilled workmen, saw long pieces of plywood on immense benches. When the public sees the plaster in the next Denham production it will be stuck on the front of some ancestral hall, looking like marble; a whole marble hall can be managed out of plaster and plywood. High up on some boxes against the wall are several model aeroplanes. These have already been seen by cinema-goers in Britain and America, flying through the clouds.

Not far away is a small group of wooden elephants, each being the size of a large Teddy bear. These elephants were used in “retakes” of “Elephant Boy,” which Mr. Robert Flaherty directed, the main production being carried out in India. On the opposite side of (he room is a model of a magnificent steamer. It is about three feet long, and was last seen tossing on the waves of the Atlantic—represented by water in a bowl—in Rene Clear’s “The Ghost Goos West.”

All this pretence in the studios, however, is not really fundamental. Emotional sincerity is the thing that matters. And if that sincerity is present in the productions of Denham, they will show to the world the same qualities of quietness and peace and confidence that are evident in the village at the studio gates, ;